According to the Victoria Advocate “UFO in the sky? texas is one of the top three states for sightings” (posted 15th feb,2008).It mentions “The 24-year-old was traveling down U.S. Highway 183 – between Cuero and Gonzales – on his way home from a New Year’s party when he said he spotted a UFO in the cool, night sky” (extract from article).

He later went on to say that it dissappeared and reappeared 30 minutes later. He video taped it, and this can be seen below.

and laterNot to sure what to think of this video – the skeptic in me wants to shout out and say no, due to shaking of the video (could just be a star/planet,ect)…not really enough to go on from this, i’m afraid (also no reference points-ie a part of a house,tree,ect to know how big it is). Although the second video, was taken later (not referring to this article) and seems slightly more interesting?Ok…. I’m going to be frank- they both could be anything.

MUFON add in this article, that there are between 15-20 sightings a month, putting it in the top 3 states…. however, they do mention that 9 out of 10 times, they are explained as IFO’s. It then goes on to say that:

“In early January, Nancy Adams was on her way home from work at about 6 p.m. when a light streaked across the sky and fizzled away like a firework.

Her home sits on a tall hill about two miles from U.S. Highway 87, she said, and with the cloudless sky, she had a clear view.

“”I’ve seen shooting stars many times in my life, but that wasn’t what this was,”” said Adams, who works at an area pharmacy.””This had a trail of fire behind it.””

Adams described herself as “as big a believer as the next guy,” but said she never thought the incident was anything more than a meteor.

“They say those things fall to the ground all the time,” she said. “It was neat”” (extract from article). MUFON has noticed that there are more sightings being reported now, and from all types of people.

At the end of the article it has :

“The Mutual UFO Network offers 10 tips for those who see a UFO:

Don’t panic but do protect yourself.

This could be a once-in-a-lifetime event, and you’ll want to remember what you see.

Remain objective.

Attempt to determine what else the object might be. Not all flying objects are extraterrestrial.

Record the event through photos or a video camera.

If you don’t have those items with you, attempt to draw what you’ve seen.

Make an audio recording of what you see as it occurs.

If you don’t have a recorder on hand, write the information down.

If other people are with you, ask them to record their observations.

Don’t discuss it with them until after you’re done compiling what you’ve seen.

If the UFO left evidence behind, don’t disturb it.

Take pictures of the site and take precise notes. Take precautions before touching anything.

If the UFO is far away, attempt to give some idea as to its size.

At arm’s length, determine what could cover the object from view, such as a quarter, dime or tennis ball.

Attempt to determine how far away the UFO is and how fast it’s traveling.

How long did it take to cross the sky? How far off the ground was it?

If you come upon an extraterrestrial being, protect yourself.

Reach a safe distance from the being and record any information possible, as long as you remain safe.

“”It’s clear.
Whatever is hovering over Erath County isn’t leaving. UFO reports are pouring in. Two are from original witnesses, and two new ones are coming aboard.
This time there are pictures and video — Constable Lee Roy Gaitan made sure of it.
The following are accounts from Gaitan, Ricky Sorrells, Mac McKinnon, and a source not wishing to be identified.Note: Gaitan’s first sighting was with his eight-year-old son on Jan. 8 when he saw a red glow that faded and then reappeared. Later he said he saw bright white lights that seemed to “bounce around in the sky” and took off at a “blazing speed”” (extract from article).

Their Mission Statement near the bottom states:“Our purpose is to promote full disclosure of knowledge and information regarding unidentified flying objects throughout the world by encouraging the government and military forces of the United States of America through reasonable and peaceful means provided to us by the United States Constitution” (exact words from article).

Fox4 has an interesting video about the Stephenville ufo sighting which is definately worth watching….according to this, the sightings came from a 60 mile radius, and are still being seen. see here for video. (posted 13th feb,2008). I am still a bit skeptical about the photos of the ufo though!

Another interesting source i have stumbled across, although written in 1996, mentions in these documents, Air Force procedure with regard to ufos … see here for details (PDF file).

Ok….. i have highlighted this article, just in case you are not aware of it…. it is basically a letter of protest aimed at E-T (thats stephenville Empire Tribune), also a link to congress can be found here too. the article can be found here .

Unfortunately i cannot use the congress link, but will be thinking of an e-mail to write to the paper.

Answers.Ricky Sorrells just wants answers. And, in light of what he’s been through, it doesn’t seem to be a lot to ask.Witnessing an unidentified flying object four times since the beginning of the new year, then having military aircraft whizzing over his land and disrupting his sleep and livestock, followed by a string of mysterious phone calls and in person encounters from individuals demanding he “shut up” about what he saw, and landing unexpectedly in the international spotlight, has taken a toll on the 37-year-old man accustomed to the simple life.“If you told me a while back that I would be sitting here talking to you about UFOs I would have said, ‘No way, not in a million years,” Sorrells said. ” Now, I know for the rest of my life I’ll keep looking to find out what it was.”Sorrells said he is receiving a lot of support from family and friends helping him to keep an eye on things. He said that support has been a great help to him.

“I’m not going to freak out or anything,” Sorrells said. “I just think the government should come forward and help us to figure out this thing. I think people should write to their congressman or something.”

Sorrells said soon after his Associated Press interview went around the world in mid-January – not only was he allegedly contacted by a Lt. Colonel telling him to keep quiet about what he saw, he was also contacted by a woman named Linda Moulton Howe.

Howe’s Web site touts: “Earthfiles is a crossroads where experts, eyewitnesses and viewers meet to share the latest updates in earth and astronomical mysteries, in-depth reports that go beyond the 6 o’clock news. Earthfiles reporter and editor, Linda Moulton Howe, is an Emmy Award-winning TV producer, investigative reporter and author who goes directly to the men and women at the forefront of science and environmental challenges and to firsthand eyewitnesses of high strangeness. Earthfiles.com received the 2006 W3 Silver Award for excellence in news category. Earthfiles.com also received the 2003 WebAward for Standard of Excellence and the 2000 Encyclopedia Britannica Award honoring Internet excellence.”

Sorrells said he vaguely remembered listening to her on a radio program years ago while on a road trip and her name clicked with him. It was the only familiar name he knew and she promised to do an investigation so he agreed not to talk to anyone else until she could make the trip from New Mexico. Howe arrived in Dublin last week and stayed with Sorrells and his family to conduct the investigation and left late last week.

“I told her everything I knew and showed her my property,” Sorrels said. “After she left, I felt I had honored my commitment with her. Things have settled down a little and I feel free to talk about the experiences I have had. I just didn’t want to do anything that would interfere with her investigation because I want the truth.”

He said the last time he saw the object he was able to get a video on his camera phone and said he has seen some other “pretty good footage” taken by others.

One night Sorrells said he had four helicopters flying at such low altitude that when a spotlight was shined up at them from Sorrells’ pickup he could see the pilot throw his arm up in front of his eyes to block the light. But there has been another strange occurrence recently on his property that leads him to believe the military is involved. It was an unexpected visitor about 1 a.m. who may have left something behind.

“I was in bed asleep,” Sorrells said. “I keep my bird dogs on the east side of my house and three others on the west side. The black lab doesn’t bark until someone comes across the cattle guard and the Catahoula doesn’t bark until she actually sees someone. They were all barking so I got up to see what was going on.”

Sorrells said he walked to his bedroom window and looked out to the top of his driveway – he saw someone.

“I went around the bed and grabbed my rifle,” Sorrells said.

His family was still sleeping, so with one hand on his gun and one hand on his backdoor knob, he peered through the window of the door to see if he could spot the intruder again.

“He had positioned himself in between the car and the pickup 40 to 50 feet from my back door,” Sorrells said. “He stood staring at me rocking back and forth. I didn’t think his feet were moving but the next morning when looking at his tracks I could tell they were.”

Sorrels said it was cold and misting rain and it was obvious the guy was “dressed for the elements with a heavy parka-like coat.”

He said he strained to see if the man carried a gun but could not see one but could clearly see the face of someone he thought to be in his late 20s or early 30s judging from the way he “walked and acted.”

“I’m trying to decide whether or not to open the door,” Sorrells said. “We’re just standing there face to face looking at each other. I’m thinking he’s dressed for the elements and the dogs are raising such a ruckus he must know he’s in danger of being caught. That’s when I realized he wanted me to see him.”

Sorrells said the trespasser had positioned himself in such a way he decided he could be vulnerable if opened his door. He thought of his family and then the man slowly turned and walked into the woods.

“He walked through an area where I’d cleared the brush so apparently he’d been there before because he knew where to go,” Sorrells said.

Sorrells said shortly after the unwelcome caller disappeared the dogs calmed down and he stayed up the rest of the night to keep watch.

Later, when walking through the woods on his property with Howe, he decided to return to a bare spot where his property line ends at a fence.

“It is washed out there and I like to go there to look for deer and turkey tracks.” Sorrells said. He said he’s an avid hunter and keeps abreast of the wildlife on his place. He said he had not been to this particular spot in about a month.

“The first thing I saw was a man’s footprint,” Sorrells said. “Ms. Howe videotaped me putting my foot beside it. The sun was going down and I saw something shiny.”

Sorrells said he walked over and picked up a bullet – a shiny new 25-06 Remington – with some dotted tarnished smudges.

“I think the man that I saw that night dropped this bullet and the tarnished spots are from the misting rain that night,” Sorrells said. ” I just think it was the military showing me they could get to me if they wanted to.”

Sorrells said he just doesn’t think a hunter poaching on his property would’ve dropped the bullet. He said he doesn’t have trouble with poachers. While he knows there is no way to prove it could have been from the same man it’s something he keeps mulling over. Sorrells returned home with the bullet in hand and took it apart to look at the powder to see if he could glean any information at all. A local gun and ammunition authority said there was no way to identify if such a bullet was from a military source.

“Talking about military powder is like talking about military gasoline,” he said. “There is no difference.”

Meanwhile, Sorrells said he and other witnesses are considering setting up a Web site to encourage people to do what they can to influence government participation in finding out about the curious, sometimes frightening, sightings.

“I’ve heard that other countries are releasing information on what they know,” Sorrells said. “We’re thinking of calling it (the site) ‘Stephenville Lights.’ Too many people have seen something not to try and continue finding out about it. We want to know what it was.”http://www.empiretribune.com/articles/2008/02/04/news/news01.txt also see here

Some people have suggested that he is only in it for some fame, but i’m not so sure; i believe that he could be telling the truth.

However, this is not the only strange news to come out of this UFO sighting:

Angelia Joiner has lost her job at the Stephenville Tribune for evidently writing too much about the UFO sighting….. well i for one am glad she did, and she must have worked hard, for all the articles were excellent.

She kept us all informed about what was going on….and i say this because as i live in the UK, reliable sources on this were hard to come by, but Angelia’s was one that i came to enjoy, for its frankness and detailed articles. so thank you.

Whatever happened to freedom of speech; the Stephenville Tribune must have got many hits from its website alone, solely on the UFO sighting coverage, and many more must have bought the paper due to these sightings.

Steve Hudgeons, Mutual UFO Network assistant state director for Texas, released a media brief yesterday that promised a formal news conference in March at the Dublin Rotary Club Building. The Dallas Fort Worth MUFON chapter and Hudgeons will present information Hudgeons gathered during a late January trip to Stephenville, Texas, after UFO sightings had been reported there earlier in the month.

“The media will be invited to hear the results of our investigations,” Hudgeons wrote.

Hudgeons also reported that the DFW chapter has reserved the Dublin Rotary Building on Feb. 23 for additional witnesses to the Jan. 8 UFO sighting. “We . . . hope to see those that didn’t attend [the Stephenville follow-up investigation] or were unable to attend the Jan. 19th meeting,” Hudgeons wrote.

“We further ask that the Media NOT attend this meeting. We appreciate the new -found sincerity of the Media of late, however, 50 or so years of media ridicule hasn’t been forgotten and has caused many witnesses to shy away from our investigations.”

The Air Force Reserve released a statement on Jan. 23 claiming the bright lights and UFOs spotted in Stephenville had really been ten of their F-16 fighter jets on a nighttime training mission. This information contradicts their earlier denying of activity in the area.
(Full article from sanangelo live-posted feb 7th 2008)).

I just hope, in light of very recent events, that the Dublin Rotary Building is not made available, for an unknown reason??

A few miles south of Walnut Springs, behind significant hills on the west side of the site, and dense foliage on the east side, lies what appears to be an abandoned airport. Terrain and foliage, plus relative distance from highway TX-144 on the west side, and highway TX-927 on the east side, prevent unrestricted viewing of the location.

The facility is not marked as abandoned (magenta circle with an “x” centered on the circle) on any VFR sectional, or, any other aerial navigation map, unlike other abandoned or closed airports across the world, and by ICAO convention (International Civil Aviation Organization).

However, online photography does show both “runways” on site (there is a large, main runway of about 6,000 feet in length, and a smaller, slightly fan-shaped surface of about 1,500 feet in length), marked with what appears to be FAA-standard yellow “x” markings, indicating the surfaces are abandoned runways, but are unusable, unsafe, or both.

The physical location is inside a rough triangle that is composed of the cities of Walnut Springs, Morgan, and Meridian. The latitude and longitude is N 32.02536, W -97.67854, respectively.

The mystery airport is not the Diamond Seven Ranch private airstrip, located north-northwest of Morgan.

The site is easily found on all free mapping web sites. Microsoft TerraServer USA and Google Maps have the best photography of the location yet found.

All roads leading to the location are closed with green-painted US Government gates, and “No Trespassing” signs abound. The described signage is true for the entrance from TX-927, and TX-144.

January 1, 2008 Update:

Overnight research and correspondence has provided a potential explanation for this location’s “mystery” airport.

Apparently, the site is a either a former, or still active, testing location for cross-section reflectivity of different types of ground- and aircraft-based radar. The relative proximity of the Ft. Worth, Texas, military/industrial manufacturing base may have a bearing on the facility. The facility is not a runway for aircraft, in the conventional sense.

Several similar locations can be found in California and Florida (extract from article).

There are rumours that it is an underground base; that there may be a possible link with the Montauk project.

SO could this secret government installation have something to do with what happened in the Stephenville ufo sighting… was it part of the incident, was it the incident itself, were they/are they hidding stuff at this location?

“The evidence for a UFO/Nuclear Connection grows stronger by the day. Official FBI, CIA, Army and Air Force documents establish, beyond a doubt, that UFOs have been seen and reported where uranium was mined and plutonium was manufactured (the Congo, New Mexico, The Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the Hanford Plant at Washington, the Savannah River facility at South Carolina).

Official reports are on file of UFOs seen where bomb development took place (Los Alamos, Sandia Base) and where nuclear weapons were stored (New Mexico: Los Alamos,Manzano Mountain near Kirtland, NM, and Texas: Killeen Base ant Camp Hood.

This is the second part of that story, the Camp Hood Sightings, which we produced to include all the known cases and provided links to the full report directories and official supporting documents. The matrix for this chronology is based on the portion of the book, “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects”, by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, where these sightings and the story surrounding them is covered in detail. Where enough information is not available to produce a case directory, the supporting documents are provided as temporary directories” (extract from article).

It then goes on to give descriptions of sightings from november 2nd 1947, until may 25th 1995.

A few examples in this database can be seen below :

“Aug. 4, 1965; Dallas, TX (BBU)
1:30 a.m. Man in a car saw a red and blue light, thought it came from a police car, then was passed by a huge, orange object flying at ground level. (Vallée Magonia 672)”

May 25, 1995; Bovina, TX
Cat 9 and 11. 10:30 a.m. Captain and First Officer of America West Airlines Flight 564 reported a large silhouetted cigar-shaped object, pulsating lights along body. An America West B-757 airliner was cruising at 39,000 feet near Bovina, Texas, en route from Tampa, Florida, to Las Vegas, Nevada. When the background clouds pulsed with lightning, they could see the silhouette of a dark, wingless, elongated cigar-like object around the strobing lights. Estimated to be 300-400 feet long. The bursts of speed were computed to be between 1,000 and 1,400 m.p.h” (extracts from article).

This data is interesting, as it proves that sightings in this area have been reported for quite a while…. the closest matches to the Stephenville sighting have been given above .

Ufo sightings from Texas, can also be seen here from 1723 until 2005… the texas sightings are mixed in with other sightings, but it is worth sifting through to look at these too.

At the same site (ufodna.com) there is an article (one among other interesting ones) called “The annual ufo cycle” , which mentions :

“UFO sightings follow a rather consistent annual cycle, with a spike in January, another in March, then a rapid growth from May to July, and a peak through November, followed by a crash in December. This varies little from year to year as the decades go on” (extract from article)…

To a certain respect this seems to be true, but to be honest, i might have to go and have a look and check this.

Anyway, to conclude: the Texas area seems to have had more than its fair share of ufo sightings, and the recent Stephenville ufo sighting is testament to that fact.

Looking back into previous sightings, in the immediate surrounding area, and then the wider area of Texas as well, it can possibly help us build up a picture of what is going on (any hotspots for instance), among other things…. of course some of the sightings are hoaxes, or IFOs and this must be taken into account as well.